CGI and AI are going to turbocharge 'fake news' and make it far harder to tell what's real

An image from a video
suggesting that Julian Assange is dead and has been replaced by a
CGI model.Storm
Watch/YouTube

Most people trust what they watch — but that won't
always be the case.

Tech is being developed that will make it easy to
create fake video footage of public figures or audio of their
voice.

The developments aren't perfect yet, but they threaten
to turbocharge "fake news" and boost hoaxes online.

In years to come, people will need to be far more
skeptical about the media they see.

LONDON — Late last year, some WikiLeaks supporters were growing
concerned: What had happened to Julian Assange?

The then-45-year-old founder of the anti-secrecy publisher was no
stranger to controversy. Since 2012, he has sheltered in the
Ecuadorian Embassy in Knightsbridge, London, following
allegations of sexual assault. (He denies them and argues the
case against him is politically motivated.) But the publication
of leaked emails from Democratic Party officials in the run-up to
the US presidential election saw Assange wield unprecedented
influence while at the centre of a global media firestorm.

A definitely alive
Assange, standing on the balcony of the Ecuadorian Embassy in
London.PA Images

Video interviews and photos of Assange were closely scrutinised
amid speculation that they might have been modified with
computer-generated imagery — or faked entirely, as at least one
YouTube analysis alleged.

"We need to look at the many glitches in that interview, and
there were many for sure,"
one amateur sleuth wrote on Reddit. "Either terrible editing
went on or CGI or whatever was just not fluid enough to make the
grade. We need to understand why Assange's head looked like a cut
and paste to his suit."

This is not normal behaviour. When watching newsreel, or a clip
of an interview on Facebook, most people don't give much thought
as to whether the footage is real. They don't closely scrutinise
it for evidence of elaborate CGI forgery.

But these concerns may not be confined to the paranoid fringes of
the internet forever.

CGI and artificial intelligence are developing at a rapid pace,
and in the coming years it will become increasingly easy for
hoaxsters and propagandists to create fake audio and video —
creating the potential for unprecedented doubt over the
authenticity of visual media.

"The output we see from these models ... are still crude and
easily identified as forgeries, but it seems to be only a matter
of refinement for them to become harder to discern as such,"
Francis Tseng, a copublisher of The New Inquiry who curates
a
project tracking how technology can distort reality, told
Business Insider.

"So we'll see the quality go up, and like with other
technologies, the costs will go down and the technology will
become accessible to more people."

In a
similar demo from 2016, "Face2face," researchers were able to
take existing video footage of high-profile political figures
including George W. Bush, Vladimir Putin, and Trump and make
their facial expressions mimic those of a human actor, all in
real time.

Even your voice isn't safe. Voice-mimicking software called
Lyrebird can take audio of someone speaking and use it to
synthesise a digital version of that person's voice — something
it showed off to disconcerting effect with demos of Hillary
Clinton, Obama, and Trump promoting it. It's in development, and
Adobe, the company behind Photoshop, is also developing similar
tools under the name
Project Voco.

And once you start to combine these technologies, things get
really interesting — or worrying. Someone could
synthesise a speech from Trump using Lyrebird and then make a
fake version of him generated with "Synthesising Obama"-style
software.

You could quite literally put words into the mouth of any
public figure.

It could undermine trust in everything you watch

Developers of this technology are awake to the dangerous
possibilities of this tech. "Making these kinds of
video-manipulation tools widely available will have strong social
implications," Justus Thies, who helped to develop Face2face,
told Business Insider. "That is also the reason why we do not
make our software or source code publically available."

Children with access to such a software could "lift cyberbullying
to a whole new level," Thies said, adding, "You can also assume
that the number of fake news will increase."

Supasorn Suwajanakorn, a researcher on "Synthesising Obama,"
agrees that it could be used to produce fraudulent material — but
argues it could also lead to more skepticism among ordinary
people. "It could potentially be used to create fake videos when
combined with technology that can generate a person-specific
voice," he said. "On the other hand, if such tools are widespread
and well-known, people can be more cautious about treating video
as a strong evidence. People know Photoshop exists, and no one
simply believes photos. This could happen with videos."

This was echoed by Yaroslav Goncharov, the CEO of the
photo-editing app FaceApp. People will just have to learn to stop
taking videos at face value, he argued. "If ordinary people can
create such content themselves, I hope it will make people pay
more attention to verifying any information they consume," he
said. "Right now, a lot of heavily modified/fake content is
produced and it goes under the radar."

US
President Donald Trump.Thomson
Reuters

He added: "Before printers were available, people could assign
much high credibility to printed materials than to handwritten
ones. Now when most people have a printer at home, they won't
believe in something just because it is printed."

There's a flip side to the fact that it will become easy to make
photo-realistic fraudulent video: It will also cast some doubts
on even legitimate footage. If a politician or celebrity is
caught saying or doing something untoward, there will be an
increasing chance that the person could dismiss the video as
being fabricated.

It's not all bad, however: Just think of the entertainment!

So should conscientious developers swear off this technology
altogether? Not so fast — there are also numerous positive use
cases, including entertainment and video gaming.

Face2face suggested its techniques could be used in
postproduction in the film industry or for creating realistic
avatars for gaming.
In the announcement of "Synthesising Obama," it is suggested
that it could be used to reduce bandwidth during video chats and
teleconferencing. (Don't bother streaming video — just send audio
and synthesise the visuals instead!) Products like Lyrebird and
Project Voco could help people with speech disorders synthesise
fluent and realistic speech on demand.

And Tseng of The New Inquiry also posits that the tech could be
used to "foster a wide culture of DIY entertainment: people
editing clips from movies but replacing the dialogue or other
elements in scenes or entirely synthesizing new clips by
emulating actors and actresses."

But, he warns, developers still have a responsibility to take
political issues into account. "Software development as a
profession has grown so rapidly through so many informal channels
that there is not much of a professional culture of ethics to
speak of," he said. "Other engineering professions have developed
pretty robust ethical standards, and those hold up because
engineers trained in those professions go through a limited
number of formal channels which expose them to those ethics. The
boon of programming education is its decentralization and wide
accessibility, but this also means people often pick up the
skills without the necessary ethical frameworks to accompany
them."

He added: "Anyone involved in the development of technology,
directly or indirectly, has a responsibility to consider these
issues, outright refuse to implement problematic technologies, or
subvert them in some way."

It wasn't a perfect recreation, but the stunt grabbed headlines
and spooked some celebrities.
Reuters reported at the time that its release led to actors
"scrambling to exert control over how their characters and images
are portrayed in the hereafter," negotiating contracts on how
their image may or may not be used even after they die.

It's time to start getting ready

It's undeniable that developments in the coming years will
heighten challenges people will face in finding and responsibly
sharing media. In trying to solve these new challenges, everyone
— journalists, developers, tech platforms, and consumers — may
have a role to play.